Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays eBook

But I will tell them one small secret in conclusion.
There is nothing whatever wrong in the ancient and
universal idea of Punishment—­except that
we are not punishing the right people.

THE DREGS OF PURITANISM

One peculiarity of the genuine kind of enemy of the
people is that his slightest phrase is clamorous with
all his sins. Pride, vain-glory, and hypocrisy
seem present in his very grammar; in his very verbs
or adverbs or prepositions, as well as in what he
says, which is generally bad enough. Thus I see
that a Nonconformist pastor in Bromley has been talking
about the pathetic little presents of tobacco sent
to the common soldiers. This is how he talks
about it. He is reported as having said, “By
the help of God, they wanted this cigarette business
stopped.” How one could write a volume
on that sentence, a great thick volume called “The
Decline of the English Middle Class.”
In taste, in style, in philosophy, in feeling, in
political project, the horrors of it are as unfathomable
as hell.

First, to begin with the trifle, note something slipshod
and vague in the mere verbiage, typical of those who
prefer a catchword to a creed. “This cigarette
business” might mean anything. It might
mean Messrs. Salmon and Gluckstein’s business.
But the pastor at Bromley will not interfere with
that, for the indignation of his school of thought,
even when it is sincere, always instinctively and
unconsciously swerves aside from anything that is
rich and powerful like the partners in a big business,
and strikes instead something that is poor and nameless
like the soldiers in a trench. Nor does the
expression make clear who “they” are—­whether
the inhabitants of Britain or the inhabitants of Bromley,
or the inhabitants of this one crazy tabernacle in
Bromley; nor is it evident how it is going to be stopped
or who is being asked to stop it. All these
things are trifles compared to the more terrible offences
of the phrase; but they are not without their social
and historical interest. About the beginning
of the nineteenth century the wealthy Puritan class,
generally the class of the employers of labour, took
a line of argument which was narrow, but not nonsensical.
They saw the relation of rich and poor quite coldly
as a contract, but they saw that a contract holds both
ways. The Puritans of the middle class, in short,
did in some sense start talking and thinking for themselves.
They are still talking. They have long ago
left off thinking. They talk about the loyalty
of workmen to their employers, and God knows what
rubbish; and the first small certainty about the reverend
gentleman whose sentence I have quoted is that his
brain stopped working as a clock stops, years and
years ago.